Twiggy Mac Prototype - $33k
Looking at that list I’m surprised the Twiggy Mac didn’t do better. Frankly if you’re a Jobs fanboy that thing should totally trump an Apple I, it’s both rarer and, well, indisputably Jobs’ baby...
But that is stupidly assuming that there’s any intrinsic or rational way to value any of this stuff. The Apple-1 is the special outlier it is because they as an asset class have successfully, despite any real world justification with regards to their actual historical significance, completely made the jump from the “Antiquities“ market to “fine art” pricing unlike any of the others. They’re not computers, they’re Andy Warhols. According to a list on the Apple 1 registry the last one sold is supposedly living in some oil oligarch’s vault in the UAE, waiting for the day it can either be resold for more, ”sold” to launder some money, or donated for a tax writeoff or to grease some publicity wheels.
Gotta be straight, there’s a lot of things about the Apple-1 that specifically make them great for this promotion. A: they’re rare, but not *too* rare, B: they have great PR/celebrity cred, the Apple founder connection makes them positively blue chip, and C: there’s enough difference between each unit in terms of provenance and condition for the auctioneers to spin a unique story for each sale, but ultimately they’re a mostly interchangeable commodity, like an art print.
I can talk ‘till doomsday about how the Apple-1 doesn’t “deserve” this much attention, because frankly it doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter. Investors gotta invest, and regularly make up entire categories of completely bogus items to pretend are valuable. And that is completely totally 100% what is going on here. So far as I’m concerned almost every single thing Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons crapped out over their entire careers hardly deserves to be wrapping paper or a doorstop, but I’m not part of the club that gets to pretend they’re worth $58 million a pop.(*)
(*This is why tech bros love crypto; it’s *entirely* a land of make believe in which as long as everyone believes that turning fossil fuels into waste heat doing useless math problems in a third world datacenter to create “scarcity” out of nothing is a useful thing to do they totally have billions of dollars. In any sane universe does this make sense? Obviously not, but whatever, humans sure do love their stories.)